A systematic and timely exploration of how corporate profits, personal fortunes and philanthropy have benefitted American society over the course of a century.
As Americans debate income disparity and federal policies aimed at ending the recession, debut author Dunn revisits history to unearth relevant data from public policy spanning the first decade of the 20th century to the present. His quest: to find out where the profits go and who benefits from them. At the outset, Dunn invokes the Watergate-era phrase “follow the money.” He begins with how customer choices control the fate of business, then compares widely varying corporate performance across major industries and assesses the impact of government policies on investors. He also examines philanthropy across decades, tracking charitable giving by the foundations and descendants of the five wealthiest men in 1905. His finding: “Philanthropy returns corporate profits and personal wealth to society over time, often at a value that greatly exceeds their original worth ... often addressing causes that voters neglect with a passion and practicality that government agencies do not possess.” Dunn asks how society can fuel economic growth to replenish philanthropic coffers, concluding: “We promote innovation by letting more of the profit from business activity stay with the investors who risk capital. We suppress it by taking more of the profits in taxes.” Criticizing Keynesian economics or asserting that Roosevelt’s policies prolonged the Great Depression isn’t new, but Dunn’s coinage of “The Dark Age of American Innovation” should attract attention. A compelling graph shows how U.S. patent applications did not recover to 1929 levels until after President Kennedy’s tax cuts and then surged following Reagan’s cuts. Dunn deftly explains balance sheets, income statements, price-earnings ratios and return on equity. More notable is the author’s graceful narrative style, which never bogs down despite the book’s complicated subject matter. In economics there are always opposing viewpoints; whether or not readers share the author’s conclusions, they will find his approach well-reasoned, his presentation crisp and the historical details engaging. This cogent, well-constructed apologia of American capitalism deserves wide readership.
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-1466249547
Page Count: 414
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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